7.17

     I started going through my dictionary and trying to change all the initial "z"s from S* to STK.  The VITAC book says I should, and I’ve had some problems with the S*, so I decided I might as well.  As I was painstakingly updating 200 entries, I started to wonder how much I really needed words like "marbelization" in my dictionary.  I got through all of those, and then I decided to just look at all instances of "z" so I could catch everything that I needed to change, and I decided I should probably wait and make sure that change is going to "stick" before I spend all that time changing my dictionary.

     When I first started incorporating StenoMaster, I loved the idea of doing "–ss" as -S and "sses"/"ces" as -SZ.  But I eventually realized that my fingers aren't that accurate, and I have trouble writing SZ quickly, so I should probably just save that for special things I already learned it for, like "less" vs. "–less" and "miss" vs. "mis-". I just now went through and deleted all 194 entries that needed to be changed back.

     I decided a while ago that SWR- was a cool way to write "shr-" instead of SH/R, but of course I never did anything about it, so when that came up in the VITAC book, I went through and fixed all 94 entries of that.  The StenEd dictionary came with all of those words defined twice with the same outline, one with an asterisk and one without.  I have no idea why.

     I also decided to adopt the method of distinguishing between words like "cash" and "carb" by writing "carb" as CAURB a while ago.  Luckily there aren’t many words like that and I had fixed most of them already, but I went through and double-checked that list, too.

     The VITAC book doesn’t like the idea of writing words like "bask" in two strokes, which StenoMaster taught me to stop doing anyway, but I went through and made sure that all 74 words like that were now correct in my dictionary.  Most of them were, thanks to having come up in the "–sk" exercise in the Phoenix drill book.

     The VITAC book also introduced me to the idea of writing words like "drank" as DRAFRNG.  I’d probably noticed that on depoman before, but it just seemed weird.  I write it now as DRA*NG, but when I saw it in the book, I tried it out, and I realized it’s the same thing, you just don’t have to move your index finger over as far.  I guess it’s a better idea, because I always had a hard time with "-nk" words, anyway.  I decided not to change those entries yet though, since it’s another one that’s going to be a big project

     The book also says you should distinguish between "comp" and "ex", because StenEd says to use KP for both, which does create some conflicts.  I think I’ve got that mostly under control though, since I learned which ones to watch out for in theory class, so I’m just going to leave it.  The book says to use –GT for –TH so you can have *T open for proper nouns, but -GT would really mess up my words like "netting", so I’m not doing that, either.

     It says to use –FT for –ST for the same reason, but I think that would be too much of a change for me to worry about right now when it hasn’t been a problem yet anyway.  It also says to do –FRB for –V, but that’s really hard for me to stroke, so I’m not doing that, either.  And of course, the biggest  suggestion I’m ignoring is to not incorporate any endings.  I don’t see any reason to give that up.

     So I sort of finished another section of the book, by just about skipping half of the ideas and saving the other half for later.  I also discovered that "snooze" wasn’t in my dictionary.

     I got this BackJoy thing, and I kind of like it, and I think I’m going to keep it, but it changes my posture, so now I have to figure out all over again where to put the Report-It, and I’m not having much success yet, which means I’m not making much progress on this minute, which is also super fast.  I did get up to 250 wpm at the end of it today, though.

6.15

     I am starting to show some progress on my piece again, although I don’t really feel any better about it.  I'm consistently getting to 250 wpm at the end, and I have even hit six strokes per minute a couple of times.  Both times were when I was trying very hard to go as slowly and write as cleanly as possible.  It’s so weird how I always wind up going fastest when I’m trying to write the slowest, and I write the slowest when I’m trying to go faster.

     I had time for about two more hours of dictionary maintenance today. I started by going back to the suffixes.  The general consensus on depoman was that I should have as many prefixes and suffixes as I could use, but I decided that I hadn’t done all of that work in vain.  I finished weeding out all the suffixes that needed to keep their asterisks, like the ones that are just words like "woods,"  and also ones that included –th and –v. I put all of those back in my dictionary.  Then I deleted all of the suffixes that started with DL- that I made when I went through the NJCaptions list.

     Then, I went through all 780 suffixes that were left and took the asterisks out of them.  Then I had about 800 suffixes that needed to be reintroduced into my dictionary, now sans asterisks.  As I put them back in, if there were any conflicts I mostly just didn’t enter the suffix.  I know a lot of them came from Mark’s dictionary, and those aren’t exactly vital for me to have.
     My plan now is that after I go through the VITAC book, I’ll go back through the NJCaptions list again and make suffixes and prefixes again, because I’ll probably want to make them differently than the first time around.  After I’ve done that I’ll have to go through the big list of conflict-finding sentences on the Phoenix site.

     After that I went through my dictionary and found all of the words that start with RI or TI or anything like that and either changed them or got rid of them.  The one problem I didn’t fix was that fact that StenEd teaches that DI should be used for di- and –dy, which doesn’t seem like a good idea.  But I’m not going to worry about that for now.

     Then I discovered that I don’t have to worry about the next four concepts in the VITAC book, because they’re already accounted for in my theory.  The last concept halfway was.  Since I use EN to start words, I’m not supposed to use it in the middle of words, but I do, so I had to go through about 250 entries that were in my dictionary and either delete them because I wouldn’t write them that way anyway, or change the EN to just N.
     The next thing I had to fix was the fact that I both started and ended words with EL, so I had to fix/delete 113 entries for that. I didn't have to worry about the next concept, but the last one in the "word boundary errors" section is a doozy. The book says to use ER for -er and -or, and to that end, gives you a list of 268 -or words that you should make sure translate properly in your dictionary. Based on how I break up words, it turns out most of these would involve a tucked R - activator, for example, is just ACT/VAIRT.
      Now that I think about it, actually, I'll probably just come back to the list another time. I want to go through the book and figure out what things I need to change in my writing before I go back to just dictionary-building. So that's the first section of the book "done." It took me 6 hours, and I still have 8 sections left.

Operation Delete All Asterisks

     I also had time to actually start on the VITAC book.  The very first thing it talks about is distinguishing starting, middle, and ending sounds.  For example, with the long E, it says you should do RE to start, no matter what the spelling is, RAOE in the middle, and RI at the end.  That’s actually what I already did when I learned StenEd, but then I added an asterisk to RI, because I thought it would conflict with things like ridiculous, which I wrote with RI.

     I did a horrible job recording what I changed, with StenoMaster and my asterisks and suffixes and everything, so I decided that with the VITAC book, I was going to make a list of everything I changed and actually practice and learn all of it.  I realized, though, that I never fully, 100% committed to and learned the asterisk in all of the -y endings -- -ty, -ry, -ly, etc.  So I had to put them on the list of things I needed to practice and learn. 

     And then I thought, since I never really learned this asterisk business in the first place, and since the VITAC book is going to have a different solution for any possible conflict I would have had that I was trying to avoid by using the asterisks…why keep trying to learn the asterisks?  Why not just go back to writing everything the StenEd way, and only make changes from the VITAC book?

     It was an incredibly freeing thought.  I haven’t made any progress at all in my writing for the past ten months because in September, I started with the StenoMaster, and in January I gave up on that and started with the asterisks, and somewhere in there I added all of these suffixes. I literally have 2000 suffixes and 500 prefixes. All of that pretty much destroyed my writing altogether. 

     Of course, now it’s going to be hard to unlearn what I have trained myself to do with the asterisks, but I think it will be for the best.  There are a few suffixes I’m going to have to remember to do with asterisks.  I looked through the entire VITAC book last night to see just how many there were.  It only took about half an hour, and I discovered that there aren’t many.

     I think giving up on these asterisks, and all the extra prefixes and suffixes that I never learned anyway, is the most exciting thing in steno since I learned about StenoMaster, which I was quite excited about.  The VITAC book actually does suggest one StenoMaster principle, which is using F instead of S/K, so BAFK instead of BAS/K.  That's still a hard one for me, but I've never stopped trying to use it.

    Unfortunately, now I have to go through my dictionary and delete all the things I put in with asterisks, which is going to be quite a project indeed.

Square One

     I’ve been feeling very frustrated with my writing lately.  I feel like I've changed so many things from StenEd.  I started with integrating endings, and that opened a whole can of worms and conflicts.  Now when I write, I’m always trying to remember to incorporate endings, or remember which ones I can’t do, and especially now that I read about the ones I can’t incorporate on Phoenix, I’m worrying about that, too.

     When I got the Magnum Steno book, I decided to put all the prefixes and suffixes in my dictionary, and that caused some conflicts, so I tried to change the way I write some things.  I never practiced them, though, so when I tested for Caption Masters, a few things came out wrong, and the instructor suggested that I add asterisks to all of my suffixes.  I didn’t really know what was or what should be a suffix though, and it didn’t seem like a good idea to try to figure out "is this actually a suffix, or just a second stroke" when I was writing, so I decided to add asterisks to all of my second strokes, but I didn’t really commit to it, and I just kind of do it when it comes naturally, but it’s still something that slows me down when I write.  Even though I should just do an asterisk on all of my second strokes, I always have that moment of hesitation where I wonder, "do I need one here or not?"

     Then I bought the Broadcast Captioning Training Manual from NJCaptions, and I decided to add all the prefixes and suffixes that were listed in it to my dictionary, and that caused all kinds of conflicts and problems and things I had to come up with alternate ways of writing in order to fix.  I started using DL- at the start of my suffixes, because there were times when the outline for the suffix by itself was a regular word, and I needed to use that same outline as a prefix and a suffix, so I put the asterisk in the prefix, and then I didn’t have any way to distinguish the suffix, so, DL- worked great.  But I didn’t want to have to remember which ones needed DL and which ones didn’t, so where possible, I just created all of them with DL-.  So that’s another thing I have to think about; remembering the DL, and all the other things like it that I added.

     That’s basically the extent of it, but I feel like it’s really hurting my speed.  It seems like every time I hear a word, I experience massive hesistation where I have to think, "how am I supposed to write that now?" It’s all for the better because my writing will be truly conflict free, unlike it was with just the StenEd, where, for instance, the outline for the word con, and for words starting with con and for words ending with con were all the same.  But I almost feel like I’ve created this mutant theory, and I need to go back to square one and go back through my theory book and start completely over and do it all again, spend six months writing through all the exercises and word lists and train myself to write the way I want to now.

     I don’t have time for that kind of thing though, not unless I stop speedbuilding, and I certainly don’t want to do that.  I think, though, before I start going through my dictionary wholesale and trying to fix everything to at least translate properly when I remember to write it the way I want to, I’m going to work through the VITAC book, since I’m probably going to change even more things as I do that.  It talks about what is and what isn't a suffix, and has ways to fix basically all the conflicts.  I wish I had started with it and only changed things based on it to begin with.

     In other news, I got my minute today.  I don’t feel too much accomplishment about that though, because it was only at 215.  That’s the annoying thing about Realtime Coach.  Even though it says a piece is at a certain speed, it’s really not.  It’s all over the map.  It could start faster than it says it is, and then get slower than it says it is, and then be at the right speed for a minute.  It’s crazy.  I decided to just ignore that and practice the ones that say they’re the speed I want, though.

5.15

     I got my minute today!  I practiced writing it for about half an hour, and then on the very last runthrough before I was going to take a break, I decided to loosen up a little and not be so strict about accuracy, and I got it at 250 wpm (at the end, anyway) and 96% accuracy!  It took me exactly a week, which isn’t bad at all.  I think it was easier material than the rest of the piece has been, though.

     I realized that I really like writing to a metronome.  It’s almost calming, knowing that everything is going to happen at exactly the same speed.  I also like how there’s not really any pressure, at least not right now when I’m just seeing what my top speed is on all the exercises.  Yesterday my average speed actually went up from 125 to 129, but today it went back down to 127.  I had to record something at 75 wpm, which is insanely slow.  It had to do with PL-, which I’m apparently very bad at. “Fruit” was thrown in, too, though, and I guess all of those PL- words with an FR- word in the middle really threw me off. I think I have problems with F- in general.

     The Phoenix book talks about how important keyboard position is, so you’re able to reach all the keys easily.  I decided to try lowering my machine a bit.  I use the plastic case it came in as a lap desk, so to lower it, I opened the case and started writing on just the thicker half.  It looks weird and I don’t know if I could do it if I had a desk in front of my legs, but it seems to feel a lot better.  I should probably buy a real lap desk, but I like the idea of not having to bring it with me or spend money on it.

     I think the new position has helped, though, because ever since I got the LS, I’ve had to actually put my fingers on the home row to figure out where the machine is every time I take my hands off it, which I never had to do with the SRT. I had to define 150 null strokes because I would of course never hit the home row, but it would still help me know where I was.  I created my last one on the 6^th.  I can’t really be sure if I’m using the null strokes less, but it seems like I am.

     I don’t know if it was inspired by the Phoenix book or not, but I also decided to file my nails extremely short.  I always kept them short to help me write, but I was never truly writing with my fingertips like you’re supposed to.  I filed them down yesterday after my practice, as low as I could go without hurting myself.  They look really pathetic now and it’s actually rather depressing.  I like writing with them short, though.  It feels like being barefoot.  I can feel the keys a lot better.  I’d like to say that’s why I got my minute today, but I don’t think that was it.  I’ve been feeling more confident about it for the past couple of days, and I think I was successful in focusing on being slow and accurate with this minute.

     I started incorporating endings into my root words about nine months ago.  I went crazy with it and added everything you could.  It turns out that it wasn’t quicker for me to write that way, at least not right now, so I’ve backed off of some of it.  I added -L as an option for –l and –ly, but it created this problem where it would suggest it for both things on the same word, and I just now got around to taking it out of the integral prefixes and suffixes option.  I went ahead and added it as an option with an asterisk, although sometimes I do write it without one, like SLOEL for slowly.  I always get things like that popping up as suggestions, and I’ve started declining them when I think I won’t use them, to leave them open for Translation Magic to do something else with.  I wonder if I should just take them out of the table altogether?

     I found out yesterday that all the spots for the Caption Masters program in July are full.  I was going to re-test at some point before July, and I checked the status every day, and it magically went from three seats open to none, so I guess they weren’t updating it, because I doubt all three filled up in the same day.  That kind of pulled the rug out from under me, but maybe I can change the way I practice on my own.  I want to get a copy of the VITAC book because it deals with how to change your writing and your dictionary to get ready for realtime, and that’s definitely something I’ve been trying to work on (and struggling with) recently.  The only problem is you can’t buy the book anywhere!

Present Day

     I just got the Phoenix Fast Track to Machine Shorthand Speed book.  A couple of days ago, I spent some time reading through the introduction.  I agree with a lot of the principles and ideas, even though I learned StenEd writing theory, not Phoenix.  The author, Carol, talks about how important it is to have accuracy before speed so that you can build your muscle memory and rely on your fingers to write strokes accurately without having to consciously tell your fingers where to go.  I don't agree with Mark's strategy of getting something down for every word no matter how unreadable it is.  Like Carol says, when you do that, you're just training yourself to write things incorrectly.  You have to write them properly to build muscle memory.

     Carol also advises "trailing," or staying about four words behind the speaker so you can pick up on phrases you might have briefs for, and also so you can keep a steady rhythm.  She says students often incorrectly have bursts of high speed and then slow down.  I've noticed myself that I have that problem.  I write fast when I can, and then it throws everything else off, even though I try to keep a steady rhythm.  It's so hard not to try to keep up with the speaker and write as fast as I can, or to take advantage of places where I can speed up.  It's really interesting that Carol says the exact opposite thing that Mark does.  Mark says, "write fast, faster than you can, and accuracy at lower speeds will follow."  Carol says that speed is a natural outcome of accuracy, but accuracy is not a natural result of increased speed.

     That's how I've always felt.  I can't just write things as fast as I can, or it all comes out as slop, and I've always felt there wasn't any point in teaching myself to write slop.  I think Mark can do that because he's more of a court reporter.  I know he does, or has done, captioning, too, but I also know that out of all 5 years of results of the NCRA Realtime Contest that are listed on their website, he hasn't won a single one.  He usually finishes around 5th or 7th, although he did tie for first in one literary portion of the contest.

     The purpose of the Phoenix book is to eliminate hesitation, and I think it's going to be very helpful for me.  You practice columns of similar words, with unrelated words interspersed throughout so you can work on transitions, writing each word to the beat of a metronome.  I used that strategy before in school when the professor gave us a list of the thousand most frequently used words and had us practice them that way.  It did seem to help a bit with speed, and of course I got better at writing those words.  I'm excited to start improving my speeds on the words in the book, but there are 107 single-stroke exercises to go through.

     The first day I spent a lot of time on it and made it through the first nine exercises, but the second day I only got through five.  The book says to spend half an hour a day on it, but I don't have that kind of practice time, and Erik from depoman says 10-15 minutes a day is good, so I'm going to go with that.  In 10 minutes today, I only made it through two of the exercises.  At that rate, it would take me a month and half just to figure out what speed to start at on these exercises, and which ones I need to work on the most.  Maybe I'll have some extra time for it sometime.

     After the first day, I averaged all of my top speeds, and it was about 155.  I don't get to write a speed down unless I got that exercise with 100% accuracy.  Basically, I guess that means my realtime speed on new material is 155.  I knew that already, though.  I figured it was at about 160.  That sucks.  It makes me feel like I'm never going to get to 225, not any time soon, anyway.  This will be a good gauge for where it is, though, since I don't take tests, so I'm excited to see that start improving, too.

     I took the test to get into Caption Masters program, in January I think it was, and one of the suggestions the instructor had was that I add asterisks to all of my prefixes and suffixes.  That's great idea, but it makes me also want to add asterisks to word parts that aren't really suffixes, like the "mers" in "customers."  So I basically have to go through and re-define all 92,000 entries in my dictionary.  I'm trying to fix things as they come up, but unfortunately, when something like "-ry" comes up, and there's 1,000 entries I have to fix, it takes me a while to do it, and then all these other things like "-mon" come up and I just have this massive list that I feel like I'm never going to get to, and I use about half an hour of my practice time a day on it, when I should probably be actually practicing, but I don't have time for everything.

     Yesterday, instead of working on that, I decided to investigate the phonetics table.  I thought I would have to add a bunch of things to make it work, but I couldn't really think of anything I do fundamentally different from the StenEd theory, so I just tried to add a few helpful things that I tuck now, and then I turned on Translation Magic.  I had tried it a while ago, and it never really got anything right, so I turned it off until I could fiddle with it.  Today was the first time I did my speedbuilding practice with it turned on, and I love it!  I haven't had it come up with anything that I needed to alter my table for.  It doesn't always know what I was trying to write, but about 90% of the time it does.  The biggest problem I have is that it doesn't really catch things that I have briefs for, that I've misstroked.  But I guess you can't expect to to know about those, because they don't really follow the to phonetics rules.

     When I do my speedbuilding, I take a piece at 230 wpm, and I try to get it one minute at a time at speed.  I practice the minute until I can write it at 95% accuracy, and then move on to the next minute, and then I write both minutes together at 95% accuracy, then move on to the third minute.  It takes forever to go through a piece that way.  Maybe too long.  Maybe I should knock it back down a speed.  But I was getting things at 214 really easily, so I don't know.

     I've been working on this particular piece since March 27th, and I just started on the third minute today.  I'm focusing especially hard this time on writing everything slowly and accurately, without trying to keep up with the speaker.  I want to get my accuracy down pat and establish a rhythm.  I got up to 187 wpm on it today. I think it took me two weeks for the first minute, three weeks for the third, and one week to get them both, so we'll see what kind of progress I can make, if I can keep up with this strategy.

Background

     I'm 25 years old. I've lived in St. Louis, MO, my entire life. When I have the money, I want to move somewhere warm, probably California.   I graduated high school with a 4.3/4.0 GPA, and in December 2007, I graduated from Lindenwood University with a 4.0 and Bachelor's in Spanish.  I taught Spanish for a semester at my old high school, and then I taught for a semester at another high school.  I was mostly interested in the career for the retirement benefits, and after a year, I decided they weren't worth being miserable for 30 years.  I wanted something a little less interpersonal, so I had to find a new career.
     I found out about court reporting by looking in the big book of jobs and how much they paid at the library.  I was already thinking about medical transcription, since I could type 100 wpm and I didn't think I would get bored doing it, but I really wasn't interested in anything medical. Court reporting seemed easy enough, and in looking into it, I found out about captioning, which seemed even better.  I love watching TV, so it seemed like it would be a pretty sweet gig to just type whatever I heard on TV.

     I found a school based on which ones were NCRA accredited.  I thought about a couple of online options, but I didn't like the idea of having to lay out $5,000 right at the outset.  The only school in Missouri that was even participating (they weren't accredited at the time, although they are now) just happened to be the local community college, St. Louis Community College.  I was able to enroll in classes about a week after they officially started, which turned out not to be a big deal at all.  I wound up doing the entire program online. I took the first theory class that spring, and the second and last theory class that summer.  Learning it was a breeze.

     I did very well in all of my speed classes, and managed to stay almost a full semester ahead.  Once you got to a certain point, though, if you were in the captioning program, you stopped doing the court reporter speedbuilding classes and started just using Realtime Coach for practice and testing.  My teacher didn't think I really needed to do that, so I just signed up for Realtime Coach and started practicing on my own.  I took both of the "Broadcast Captioning" classes at STLCC, but all they entailed was writing to TV and adding words to your dictionary based on what you wrote, as well as journaling about your reactions to each type of broadcast.

     The next step after that was a captioning internship, which I had the required speed for, but the professor didn't feel comfortable having me represent the college because I hadn't taken medical and legal terminology.  She suggested I talk to some captioning companies and see if I could work out some training with them.  I'm sure that would have turned out great, since I could barely write at 180 at that point.

     Ever since then I've just been using RTC to practice away on my own.  I've been practicing about 2 hours a day the entire time I've been student, which I know isn't much compared to some people, but it's also more than others.  I'm hoping to get in to the Caption Masters course, but you have to be at "court reporter speeds," and while I'm sure I'd easily be testing there now if I had kept taking tests, as it stands I've fallen out of test-taking mode and I'm not used to writing raw material even as slow as 180, although I'm practicing at 230.

     I got my LightSpeed writer about two months ago, and learning to write on that has been a challenge.  It allows me to write much faster, which isn't always a good thing, because I get tripped up trying to go so fast.

     Somewhere back in September when I was still in the broadcast captioning class, I discovered Mark Kislingbury's StenoMaster theory and thought it was the greatest thing ever. I even bought the $260 book. I tried to write everything as "short" as I could, and lost a lot of speed trying to get my fingers into complex positions for briefs.  That wasn't such a great idea, and now I just incorporate a few of the principles, like tucking K, R, S, and G.

     I had the opportunity to observe a CART provider about a month ago, and although at first, when I thought CARTing was just following a deaf person around at school, I didn't like that idea at all, now that I know more about what CARTing is, I think that might be a great way to go, too.  You can do remote CART from home, which I think I would like, but I also like being in the classrooms, so I think doing it in person would be fun, too.  It seems like there's less pressure than with captioning, although I know it's still important to be the best you can and provide quality text.

     I wrote this on my steno machine, and it's interesting how different my writing style is from when I type on a keyboard.